Electronic content can include a wide variety of audio and/or video presentations, such as music, dialogue, still pictures, movies, and the like. With the proliferation of portable playback devices on the market, which are capable of storing and rendering near-identical copies of original audio and/or video content, coupled with the distribution capabilities of the Internet, digital rights enforcement of audio and/or video content has become an increasingly important concern for digital content providers.
Likewise, due to the portability and extremely high playback quality afforded by digital playback devices, consumer adoption of such devices has skyrocketed in recent years. However, given the wide variety of digital playback devices on the market it is not always evident what a given device's capabilities are when it comes to content playback. For example, a first family of playback devices may support play back of digital content encoded with a first encoding/decoding algorithm (CODEC) and encryption algorithm, which might not be supported by a second family of playback devices.
Currently, consumers who wish to transfer secure content (that is content that has been protected by a digital rights management system or “DRM”) to a playback device, are limited by both the type of device the content can be transferred to, as well as the operations that the playback device is allowed to perform on the content. Accordingly, a simplified mechanism for transferring secure content to playback devices is desired.